[This article by
Sarah Lindsay, daughter of Charles and Phyllis Lindsay, appeared in
the September '97 issue of Sky. Sarah's book of poetry, Primate
Behavior, is one of five finalists for the 1997 National
Book Award in Poetry. She gave a public reading of her poetry on Thursday,
October 30, at 4:00 p.m. in the Perrine Gallery.]

"I shot the Albatross,"
my father said. He said it well, too. He read us "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner" one night, and that's the line I remember, in his voice. On another night, memory tells me, he declaimed,
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty,
and despair!"

Poetry was part of the
privilege of growing up at our house. Some of the best came disguised
as Bible verses. Some was for special occasions, like the evenings
Mom put me on her lap and read Longfellow. (For laughs, she could also
do a dynamite recitation of "Barbara Frietchie.") But it came from
less formal directions, too, like Dad's Weavers records or the local
children's theater productions, which were introduced--welcome to Iowa--by
a dancing ear of corn. And one of my favorite bits of verse still is
Dr. Seuss' "Oh, save me from these pale green pants / With nobody
inside!"

So you want to write
poetry. Speaking from my own experience, which is the only one I've
had, the first step would be 1. Grow up with poetry. Or maybe
just 1. Grow up in an atmosphere with lots of interesting words. Or possibly 1. Be raised by a math professor and a French teacher
who are interested in just about everything. See that they leave lots
of books lying around the house.

Next, 2. Have good
teachers. My third-grade teacher, Karen Hughes, encouraged me to
write. In fourth grade, we had Virginia Black for music class and memorized
poetry while we thought we were only singing. My fifth-grade language
arts teacher, Anna Pavlovsky, was old-fashioned and stern and scared
me--but she also imparted to me the most remarkable news I'd ever heard:
A poem doesn't have to rhyme. Seized with liberated inspiration, I
wrote a dreadful thing that, sure enough, didn't rhyme, and it was an
honorable mention in a state contest. That's the kind of encouragement
that shapes lives. Better yet, though I didn't think about it at the
time, for the duration of a few lines, I had heard in my head a verbal
rhythm that wasn't ta-dum, ta-dum.

I was a lousy dancer
and an indifferent pianist, but I knew something about yielding to a
rhythm. My mother once found my sisters and me on the floor by her
typewriter holding up black sheets and chanting in canon: "CAR-ter's,
CAR-ter's / carbon paper carbon paper! / CAR-ter's, CAR-ter's / Made
in USA!" Even some of the letters Granny wrote from Tennessee had a
ring to them that could only come from putting the words in the order
they liked best.

Rhythm turns out to
be one of the ways to make an unrhymed poem more than prose with line
breaks. I'm partial to dactyls these days (a stress pattern similar
to waltz time), probably because I used to over the familiar iambic
pentameter. I like variation--maybe two seven-beat lines followed by
a four-beat line, and a last line that ends with three strong strokes,
like the last hard steps a child takes to stop after running down a
hill. Several years ago, I began to feel that the rhythm came first
in my head while I was writing, and words hung themselves on that unreeling
line. Illusion or not, that's when I began writing some poems that
don't embarrass me.

3. Listen. In seventh grade, I wrote a little piece of congealed sap on
"why books
are important to me" for a library contest and won a copy of Carl Sandburg's
Honey and Salt. A couple of years later, I actually read it,
and sure enough, his poems didn't rhyme. They weren't Keats or Shakespeare
but something I might aspire to imitate. "Sit with your eyes shut /
and your thumbs quiet as two / sleeping mice," I read with satisfaction,
but I didn't; I snuck into the attic or behind the water heater and
wrote bad pseudo-Sandburg.

Step 4 is probably optional,
but you might try, as I did, 4. Fail to acquire good social skills. This frees up a lot of time to hang around the house alone. Meanwhile,
5. Develop an abject fear of boredom. Properly fostered, this
can substitute for or even evolve into--dare I say it?--discipline. At
any rate, it drives you away from the rerun of "Star Trek: The Next
Generation" to your desk (or behind the water heater). Or at least
it keeps you mumbling over ideas while you're chopping rhubarb or mowing
the lawn.

6. Write a lot of
stuff. For everyone's sake, a veil of oblivion shall be drawn over
the novels I wrote in my late teens, as well as the so-called poems. But, to freely adapt one of Werner Heisenberg's principles of physics,
in order to write good stuff, one must write bad stuff. Besides, it's
good exercise. You have to get used to the writer's cramp (sorry, this
is the '90s, repetitive stress injury); you have to build up those
little bumps on your brain that are the language-lifting equivalent of
muscles.

7. Have more good
teachers. Janet Nussbaum took my eight-grade poems seriously enough
to offer actual criticism. I'm still learning to take it, but at least
she got me started.

In the wonderful Paracollege
program at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, students get to
have tutors and design tutorials. (They even get to be called "tutees.")
This explains how I obtained respectable college credit for writing
more bad stuff. And early in the process, fortunately, tutor Marcella
Taylor simply asked me, "What contemporary poets do you enjoy reading?" Ummm...8. Read contemporary poetry. Later on, John Graber gave
rousing tutorial speeches, which may be summarized here as 9. Learn
the rules, then decide when to break them.

For example, just now
instead of proceeding to No. 10, I present 8a. Do something besides
read poetry. Relying for inspiration on other people's poems is
like trying to make an omelet with scrambled eggs. You need raw material.

I get a lot of mine
these days from reading nonfiction. I read and read, and most of what
goes into my head is beans, but a few of them are jumping beans. So
I jot a note on one that jumps, and when I feel ready to write something
about it, I wash dishes for a while and take more (damp) notes. Then I
take the notes to my desk, where they effectively mess up the blankness
of the legendarily terrifying piece of blank paper that awaits me, and
start writing, and if I get stalled, I pick dead leaves off the begonia.

No point in trying to
analyze what makes particular sentences jump from a book--The Worst
Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Bone Hunters in
Patagonia by J. B. Hatcher, The Life story of the Fish: His Manners
and Morals by Brian Curtis--as long as they do. One poem, for example,
hatched from an offhand comment by Cherry-Garrard about a penguin nesting
on an empty Dutch cheese fin.

But I digress. On to
10. Mingle. Strictly speaking, you don't have to show your
poems to anyone. But finishing a poem is like waking from a dream,
and few human urges are stronger than the urge to tell someone about
the dream you just had. (Almost as strong, alas, is the urge to avoid
being that someone.) I arranged to satisfy the urge by enrolling in
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro creative writing program,
where Fred Chappell gave me a lot to think about and Bob Watson and Tom
Kirby-Smith each politely asked, "Why don't you try writing about
something else?" (Ahem. 11. Write about something besides your
own feelings. Or write sneakily about your feelings by way of writing
about something else. If you're in it for self-expression, why not
just holler out the window?)

Various others who craved
continued mingling formed a small group that met on Thursday nights
to discuss whatever poems they had brought along. Attending helped
me develop two useful habits: wanting to write one new poem a week and
drinking herb tea.

12. Be insanely
lucky. You've worked hard and long. What about publication? One
thing that worked for me was the flu.

I was scheduled to give
a reading in February 1984, but when the time approached, I was home
with a temperature, hallucinating about a seal at the foot of my bed.
The reading was moved to April. Teo Savory, who always skipped winter
readings because of her arthritis, attended the spring one. She and
her husband, Alan Brilliant, the founders of Unicorn Press, thereupon
asked me to submit a manuscript for a small-edition chapbook. They
accepted it and subsequently hired me, too.

Luck later nudged me
into the job I have now; my chiropractor's wife told me about the opening. As a copy editor, I get paid to read, and to read in a way I never had
before: asking myself with every word, "Is this right? Is this clear?
Does this sound good?" Gradually, I found that I was rewriting my own
stuff thoroughly and thoughtfully--not a claim I'd been able to make
before.

I meant to stop at 12,
but what the heck, 13. Rewrite. Only God gets everything right the
first time.

Last year, luck took
the fine literary form of "the kindness of strangers." I did my bit
by submitting poems, again, to The Georgia Review. This time,
two were accepted. (I laughed. I cried. I bought myself an octopus
brooch.) Kay Ryan, a poet in California who didn't know me from Australopithecus,
read them and sent them to poet and editor George Bradley, who wrote
to me on behalf of Grove Press requesting a manuscript. (I laughed. I cried. I panicked. I spent the summer on the floor shuffling piles
of paper.)

Reader, they accepted
it.

Lassie's Left Eye

Lassie's left eye, rumor
has it, was given to science;

the right one, at some
charity auction,

went to a mystery bidder
for thousands of dollars.

(Or maybe the other
way around.)

So what was their last
sight, the crocodile going for Timmy,

or the canine fleshpots
of Hollywood?

Stupid questions pass
the time

as he drives around
Lincoln County for med school money,

harvesting eyes from
people who died at home.

Like, is it true the
retina keeps

a print of the last
thing it saw?

The car picks up speed
down bony old hills full of snakes,

four eyes jiggling behind
him in the cooler,

and he wishes Bluebird
Hamilton or Junior Sims

would pull him over,
and have to look--

let their greater disgust
wipe his away.

He left the faces closed
and looking peaceful;

they don't have to wake
to any more surprises.

Good thing only the
corneas are transplanted,

what if a retina recipient
blinked

and saw the heavy green
flank of Mr. Fee's tractor

rolling onto his chest,
or every time

he shut his eyes it
was Mr. Story's nurse

pointing a spoonful
of mush at his mouth like a dagger.

He drives the back road
for a change, but outside Pearl

it's nothing but slow
vines taking down houses,

and what if he skids
off the curve beyond Coldwater--

he'd like to see Bluebird's
and Junior's faces,

supposing they couldn't
help but notice

the back walls of his
two eyes and all four in the box

glowing with the robes
of Jesus.

This poem sprouted
from a vague memory of one of my handsome cousins, now a doctor, telling
us what he was doing one summer, something about harvesting eyes. The
setting is the Tennessee country where my father grew up, and I tried
to get some of the storytelling rhythm that I heard when we visited
there every summer, ending with the rhetorical flourish of the Sunday
morning sermons. --S.L.

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Email Dr. Bob Marrs with any questions,
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